The Intern Diaries: Week Four

Around the fourth day after Mr. Sperm meets Miss Egg, differentiation begins.  (If you slept through high school biology, differentiation is when cells start to get specialized.)

Ok, biology lesson is over.  I was just mulling over how week four of the Interns could be subtitled, The Week of Differentiation.  It isn’t that they weren’t fully formed individuals when they arrived.  It’s how we see them and assign work to them that’s undergone some subtle changes.

Lindsay is continuing to work on social marketing optimization because she’s a star Communicator.  Not surprising.  This line from her Role-Based Assessment pretty well covers why I wanted her for this project:

She will quickly make contacts throughout the organization and get to know almost everyone. She is especially cooperative and will also try to do almost anything she is asked to do. Her focus is on interpersonal interaction and trying to get everyone to work together harmoniously. She won’t do this by direct means but by attempting to broker the arrangements that bring people together in a positive manner. As a result, she is likely to be respected by those she has contact with.

But we needed to get the database cleaned up so despite the fact that she also had this in her report: “She will not want to do organizational tasks…”, there she was in the conference room with some others, working on exactly that task, with music emanating from someone’s laptop, a pile of snacks, and the sunniest of good natures.

Meanwhile, Kartik, the Action Former, whose report included the following, managed to reorganize, clean up, and optimize my consultant certification files.  Here’s Kartik in a nutshell:

This candidate is the type of employee who can be found in the front of the group with marker in hand, developing a list of things that need to be done or important points or assignments. He is the consummate organizer. The key is that he does not organize for the present but as a way of getting things ready for the future. His style is one of handling many things simultaneously. He believes that multi-tasking in a rapidly evolving environment is essential to keep on top of everything.

The others too have their unique qualities and it’s amazing how much more productive they are when we recognize them, give them work they enjoy, and celebrate the results.

It just makes good business sense.

Happy ending: Lindsay has a project beginning Monday that is totally about communicating with people, while Kartik will get a great new organization project!

The Intern Diaries: Week Three

Another amazing week with the Super Six.  Watching them become a subculture is fascinating.  They work intensely on their own, then pair off, then they cluster.  They draw each other in and something wonderful happens.  You can see the attachments as if they were drawn in the air above their heads.  And because they are all so very Coherent (such a special quality, we have begun to capitalize it,) this crazy entrepreneurial world we inhabit doesn’t faze them, even when we are approaching warp speed.

After only two weeks, during which the first five were oriented, given assignments, put through our standard four hour consultant/agent training, and let loose, we asked them to present their projects at our weekly management meeting.  (Our sixth, only being with us for two days operated the technology – they integrated her into their subculture right away!)  And present they did, PowerPoints and all.

So what did I learn from them this week?

Most of the time, Role trumps age and experience.

In plain English, who you are is more important than what you’ve done.  Yes, I did know that in the intellectual sense.  But it never ceases to amaze me, and amazement is the substrate within which you get new appreciation.  You no longer just know.  You *know*.

The Quadruple Bottom Line

A customer sent me an email after my last post, A Family is a Team, saying it was “good to confirm my belief that your research and work is grounded in an understanding of human relations, not just work relations.”  Got me thinking about the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ – often expressed as ‘people, planet, profit’.  It’s a great idea, that you can put human capital and your ecological footprint on your balance sheet.  But he’s got me thinking that this doesn’t go far enough.

The operative word is relations.

When Triple Bottom Liners calculate the value of people, they do things like count their graduate degrees.  Ok, it’s a start but, really, a lot of overeducated people don’t bring more value to most enterprises, especially the ones who think it makes them better than other people.

Relations.  That’s the operative word.

Until we understand what happens when people relate – how they create synergetic value – and how to measure it, we’ll continue to ignore the wellspring of corporate creativity and never know when it’s running dry and what to do about it.

Why do we tolerate unproductive relationships at work when we don’t tolerate them at home?

Love in the Time of Economic Indicators

Matt’s in love.

This may seem pretty mundane given that it’s Spring and a young man’s fancy is supposed to turn that way.  But Matt is a first class Explorer.  Traveling man for a lot of his professional life.  Not exactly a bon vivant – too hardworking for that – but not a cocooner by nature.

When the economy was rocking, Matt was an executive in the human capital industry, hitting the bright lights in the big cities with pretty young things and being surprised when nothing evolved into the long term.  He’d lament, and I’d laugh and say, you need a Watchdog.  An Explorer needs the one who’ll make a home base for him (or her), even if those travels are just on the web or in the cerebral cortex.  But Watchdogs don’t go for flashdancing.  They’re more the ‘comfort food’ of the relationship world.

So I asked Matt if he was familiar with the theory of one of the world’s great economic experts who said something like this: when the economy is up, it’s easy to find a great job but harder to find love; when the economy’s down, good jobs are hard to find but love is easy.  He guessed Galbraith.  I laughed.  It’s Helen Gurley Brown, former Cosmopolitan editor and author of Sex and the Single Girl.  (I never actually referred to her as an economist but really, her pronouncement is more accurate than the predictions of the average pedigreed academic.)

Matt put it together pretty quickly and realized how distracting his success was to his goal of finding love.  He also admitted how right I was about who he’d really fit with.  But of course I had all the theory behind Role-Based Assessment at my disposal.

So here’s the moral of the story.  The economy is off and is likely to stay that way for a while.  You might as well look for love.  And don’t restrict yourself to the personal kind either.  (Caveat: Do not confuse love and sex!)

Find people you love.  You’ll know when you’re there because you can work easily with them and feel great about it.

Figure out how to create an organization with them and do something.  It doesn’t matter what as long as it’s something you enjoy doing together.  When the economic smoke clears, you might find yourself with everything you ever wanted – a great job and great love.

Learning From Interns

It’s like having a learning lab.  Not for them, for us. They apply online, take their Role-Based Assessment and we know where they’ll fit.  Then the surprises start.

Take Lauren, the Action Mover/Communicator.  Could there be anyone more suited to talking to customers and getting them what’s good for them?  So I figured she must be majoring in marketing or communications.  Was I ever wrong!  Some well meaning counselor convinced her that she should stay in accounting after she expressed her doubts.  No matter that she didn’t really like the work, though of course she is smart enough to do well in any course.  She’d already invested time, and her parents’ money, in the accounting track and it was the prudent thing to advise her to continue with it.

I knew she would be fantastic at any task involving connecting with people in a meaningful way and quickly getting what was needed.  And I have not been disappointed.  In a few months I’ve seen her do all manner of amazing things.  Even though I knew it was in her DNA – that she would inevitably do these things and do them well – it was like watching a bud bloom.

Now her internship is coming to an end and I wish I could get her and the counselor in the same room and remind them that real life is not always like in books.

Now that I think of it, this internship thing is just like speed parenting.

Warning: Powerlessness May Be Dangerous to Your Brain – and Your Business

Scary reading this morning and it wasn’t on page one of the any of my Sunday papers: Dip in brainpower may follow drop in real power on the World Science site.

The re­search­ers, reporting in Psychological Science, con­ducted three ex­pe­ri­ments, putting Dutch uni­ver­s­ity stu­dents in dif­fer­ent sce­nar­i­os de­signed to make them feel ei­ther dom­i­nant or sub­or­di­nate in “rank”. They were then asked to perform think­ing tests, such as puzzles. The “pow­erless” ones had trouble plan­ning, up­dat­ing a men­tal pic­ture and ignor­ing ir­rel­e­vant in­forma­t­ion, the authors reported, attributing this to the fact that low power people are not expected to fo­cus on the over­all goals. Con­sist­ent with this interpretation, were the results of a fourth ex­pe­ri­ment us­ing a game de­signed so that it would re­main easy to fo­cus on the task goal. It wasn’t mo­tiva­t­ion that was the problem. The less powerful participants re­ported put­ting in as much ef­fort as oth­ers, the re­search­ers said.

Whatever happened to the idea of empowering workers? Especially now when competition for human capital is high and predicted to rise? Yet more and more I hear people talk about structuring jobs to be exactly what is needed – forget what the employee needs. Wake up call:organizations can’t afford to play zero-sum games any more. Command and control just takes those human capital assets and chews them into tiny bits of useless action, uncoordinated by any Vision. And apparently the effect is long lasting.

I want a smarter world, one with more Vision, more power, more mastery, more innovation, more excellence. Ok, that may not motivate you. But what if all those people whose brains lost power because of managerial abuse put in Workers Comp claims?

Is the M&A Boom Over?

That’s the question McKinsey poses in today’s McKinsey Quarterly.  Certainly investors have realized that while mashups may make for interesting webtoys, the model doesn’t work when what you’re trying to do is integrate the people in two organizations.

If you’re in M&A and you haven’t tried using Role-Based Assessment™ at www.Tools4Entrepreneurs.com prior to investing, you’re missing the value this disruptive innovation in human capital measurement can bring to your decisionmaking.

And, whether boom or bust, isn’t it really just about making better decisions than the next guy?

Human Capital, Human Community

I love belonging to the Human Capital Institute community.  Being on the Measuring Quality of Hire Expert Panel gets me an invite to participate in their webcasts (and occasionally give one of my own).  Yesterday’s starred Kevin Wheeler of Global Learning Resources on the effects on quality of hire of assessment vs performance management.  By the end, a few things were clear.  First, to really measure quality of hire is extraordinarily difficult if you haven’t been schooled in research procedures.  Second, you really need to do both – assess before you hire and have some rational performance management system geared to what you’ve hired them for.  And third, it really is delightful to share ideas with experts who are receptive and responsive.  And most of all, it’s so nice to be welcomed by the people who turn a web and phone based experience that could feel so isolated into something that truly feels like community.  Kudos Bill, Amanda et al!